Appearances Are Often Misleading On The Environment

November 03, 1994|By Stephen Chapman.

It's easy to spot the first-timers at a Starbucks coffee bar: They're the ones who get their gourmet brew in a cup. The veterans get two cups-one to hold the coffee, the other to hold the first cup so they won't get third-degree burns on their hands. Starbucks uses only paper containers and, as its customers can attest, paper does an outstanding job of conducting heat.

Polystyrene cups, known to the world by the trademark Styrofoam, provide much better insulation. But a lot of people, including many of those who drink exotic coffee, associate any type of plastic with needless waste and destruction. So the Starbucks corporation faces a dilemma: Should it give customers a cup that protects their hands or one that satisfies their ecological concerns?

But in this realm, appearances are often deceiving. The supposed trade-off between convenience and the environment in your choice of cups is a false one. In the first place, making a paper cup requires so many resources (wood, energy, chemicals) and generates so much pollution that it does more overall harm than plastic.

In the second place, a paper coffee cup doesn't do its job nearly as well-which leads customers to take steps that defeat the purpose. Using a paper cup instead of a Styrofoam cup is mistaken. Using two paper cups instead of a Styrofoam cup is crazy.

Many environmental issues look simple on the surface but can badly confound intuition when examined in depth. Doing what feels right may mean doing what is objectively wrong. Often the first step toward good environmental policies is resisting obvious answers.

The paper-versus-plastic controversy is only the most conspicuous example of faulty impulses, one which may have faded from view but whose effects on the American psyche and the American way of life linger. A lot of people still feel the warm glow of self-approval whenever they request paper bags in the grocery checkout line. Many hard-headed greens, like those at the Environmental Defense Fund, have nonetheless come to the conclusion that spurning light plastic bags in favor of heavy paper ones is "questionable."

There have also been second thoughts about those cardboard juice boxes that millions of kids take to school. For a while, these containers were Public Enemy No. 1 among friends of Mother Nature, the ultimate symbol of the throwaway society. Maine went so far as to outlaw them.

"Some environmentalists looked at this package for about 30 seconds and decided it was bad," a spokesman for the Aseptic Packaging Council complained to The Wall Street Journal. A longer look yielded a different conclusion. "The drink box is not the environmental bad guy we once thought it was," said an official of Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet. Last spring, Maine lifted the ban.

But minds are not always changed by unexpected evidence. Mandatory recycling of household trash continues to enjoy great favor across the country, even though the demand for such material remains modest and the cost of such programs squeezes municipal budgets.

Socially-conscious Americans have leapt to the inescapable conclusion that it makes far more sense to use the material in a plastic bottle or a newspaper twice than just once. They neglected to consider that collecting, transporting, separating and reprocessing such goods may devour more resources than it saves. If there's no naturally occurring market for a used product-as there always was for aluminum cans-then it's probably a net waste to make people recycle.

Pollution and energy consumption by cars are favorite targets of environmentalist efforts, and it sounds like a simple matter to reduce their ill effects by 1) raising fuel economy standards and 2) imposing ever-stricter limits on exhaust emissions. But given the law of diminishing returns, each of these policies means spending more and more money for less and less benefit-money that might be used elsewhere for greater improvements.

Both measures also generate self-defeating consequences. Most of the worst gas-guzzling, smoke-belching vehicles are old clunkers. Getting them off the road, and their owners into newer models, would do a lot of good. But more stringent fuel economy and pollution rules mean higher prices for new cars-which leave more people with no choice but to keep the old one.

A lot of environmental sentiment, like political opinion in general, is less about solving problems than striking poses-demonstrating virtuous qualities for others to notice and admire. Unfortunately, the appearance of virtue is rarely enough, and it can even be worse than doing nothing.

But people are rational creatures. Give them time, experience and information, and they can learn. Starbucks, for instance, says it may switch from paper cups to foam. If it does, our environment and our fingers will be safer.